I know – a weird title. It was meant to be chicken a la king but all the recipes varied that I thought I’ll just use what I have in the fridge instead. After all who follows recipes around here? Not me!
So first I began with making my chicken stock. Big pan of cold water into which I dump the bones from the chicken carcass, I find using uncooked chicken bones to be OK but look at what a real kitchen uses – roasted bones! That is where the flavour comes from and since this was originally a whole chicken roasted that is what went into the pan.
I then just add a bit of salt, pepper, and some garlic and a few other herbs that I like – this is really all down to what you want. What I like you might not – so don’t put it in – put in what you like. I once saw Ina Garten put in a bouillon cube into her chicken pot pie recipe – I thought that was a good idea. So if I know I’m making a big pot of broth I’ll do the same to pump up the chicken flavour. I let this cook for about 45 minutes to an hour. I let the broth cool and then jar it up.
I have already shredded the chicken meat and deglazed the pan so the juices are in the same bowl. I have also made some homemade pasta which I froze so that I can make this a quick weekday meal when I come home.
All I have to do is make a roux (butter and flour mixture) and add some chicken broth. This batch made 2 quart jars – I’ll probably use the remaining jar for meals at work with any leftover pasta that I froze. I then sautéed some onion, celery, carrot in a pan and then added these to the sauce now. I also added a tin of mushrooms that I had in the larder as well.
I boiled a pan of water for the pasta and once that comes to a boil I added my pasta and cook for 3-5 minutes – depending on taste since they were frozen when I put them in – no need to thaw.
Serve the chicken and sauce over the pasta and voila a second meal from the initial roast chicken. But all of this meal leaves me with two meals. This one which I used pasta for and the next I’ll serve over rice. The other jar of broth will yield me two meals at work so very economical. So in all I had three main meals from one chicken (it was about 1.75 kilios) and three lunches for work. Not bad. Enjoy!
